Slenderfire-blog - A Slender Fire

(Monthly Book, November 1963)

I don't know how Ray thought this story makes him look like a good journalist. "It was the most important story of my career" what, because one of the subjects was so flattered by it that they flattered you in turn and got you to be (one of) their court stenographers for a time? He's better than most Beatles writers but this story makes him sound easily bought and bad at his job, idk why he'd tell it.

Cultivating journalists was one of John’s best PR skills. He was very good at building relationships, encouraging loyalties, creating a dynamic where his interests became the journalist’s interests.

Ray Connolly is a good example. He met Paul first, reporting on the filming of Magical Mystery Tour. He was new to the job, and remembers “sitting meekly outside the crowd in the bar in the hotel, wondering how I was ever going to get to know anyone, when suddenly someone sat in the empty chair next to mine. It was Paul McCartney.” From this start, Connolly builds a working relationship with Paul and the other Beatles. But over time, he becomes closer to John and Yoko - because they put the work in. Paul is friendly to a shy journalist, and vaguely supportive afterwards. But John rings him up, pays attention to his writing, rewards him when he (and Yoko) like what Connolly’s doing.

Here’s the big turning point. On 27 November 1969, Connolly published an article headlined “1969: The day the Beatles died”. “In writing this article, I was, in journalistic parlance, flying a kite,” Connolly explains - writing up his own guess about what was happening. “In terms of my career, it turned out to be probably the most important piece I ever wrote – and at least one of the Beatles was delighted when he read it.” And here’s how he expressed that delight:

The day after this piece was published a white rose in a see-through plastic box was delivered to my desk at the Evening Standard. An attached card read ‘To Ray with love from John and Yoko’. The unwritten message couldn’t have been clearer. From that moment I was to have my own ‘Deep Throat’ in the Beatles organisation, leaking me a steady flow of information - John Lennon.

I laughed out loud when I first read that, because it’s just so perfect. The white rose turns 1960s flower power into the new, stripped-back, all-white JohnandYoko aesthetic. It keeps the imagery of peace and flowers, but moves them into the art gallery. The rose comes encased in plastic, another trademark (think of Plastic Ono Band, or John’s enthusiasm for the idea of performing in a giant plastic bubble in Get Back.) And the written message doesn’t say anything concrete: no specific praise, no comment on the piece. Instead of committing themselves, they leave Ray to join the dots.

Which he did. More than that, just look at how he reads the situation: he sees John as his source, rather seeing himself as John’s journalist. Within a month, John and Yoko are paying Ray’s first-class fare so he can fly to Canada to report on their peace campaign. Ray Connolly strikes me as one of the brighter Beatle-adjacent journalists - he kept his independence, and managed to stay on good terms with Paul as well as John - but he fell for that one hook, line and sinker.

#notavessel

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Hello to Berlin

On Saturday night BBC 2 broadcast a one-off feature length film based on Christopher Isherwood's biography of his early life in Berlin, the period that inspired Goodbye to Berlin. 'Christopher and his Kind, starring Dr Who's Matt Smith, followed the young Isherwood's sexual and political self-discovery in 1930s Berlin, against the backdrop of rising Nazi influence and power. It was an ambitious production, taking in Isherwood's exciting new gay relationships, his friendship with a drama-queen cabaret singer, his befriending of a prominent Jewish family and the continuing intrusion of politics into his life, despite his attempts to ignore the coming disaster.Smith's performance took a while to warm to - his no-doubt accurate rendition of Isherwood's camp voice was grating at the beginning, not helped by an opening scene involving a petulant row with his chilly mother (Rome's Lindsey Duncan), but once the action moved to Berlin, things picked up. In the company of friend and occasional lover WH Auden, Christopher throws himself into Berlin's gay scene, benefiting from the Weimar Republic's catastrophic inflation rate which lets him have his pick of handsome young men desperate for British money. The exploits of Isherwood and Auden with various German boys seem less like mutual self-discovery and more like sex tourism, especially, as Auden notes drily 'They're all rampant hetters, they only use our money to pay for cunt'. I've explored this theme of straight men from poorer countries performing gay sex acts on rich foreigners for money before, and it certainly casts a different, more economically driven light on Berlin's reputation as the gay capital of the world in the 30s. But that is literally another post.

Christopher falls quickly for Caspar, a young Polish man with limited English, and befriends the collection of eccentrics that occupy his boarding house. These include Jean Ross, a hyperactive young English cabaret singer who talks, smokes and drinks incessantly, and with whom Isherwood forms a friendship despite her tendency to tap him for money. Jean is somewhat over-played by Imogen Poots, but some little details ring true – her slightly-less-than cut glass accent indicates her middle-class origins, and her decidedly off-key but heartfelt singing captures the do-it-yourself appeal of cabaret. Christopher starts out amused by her but believes her to be vapid, only to be given an unexpected lesson on political awareness when he glibly announces he has been commissioned to write for Oswald Mosely’s magazine. Jean is just one example of a character who Christopher initially underestimates, only be to humbled by them. As Jean says 'I may wear green nail varnish, but I'm not completely vacuous'.

Christopher also gets to know Wilfrid Landauer, head of the German-Jewish department store range. Played to remote, mysterious perfection by Iddo Goldberg, Landauer is a man completely in control of his life at the beginning of the story, but by 1933 his stores are closed and ransacked and he is missing. Goldberg was underused in this role - in Goodbye to Berlin for example Landauer has a much more prominent role and provides much-needed political context. However he only appears for a handful of scenes in 'Christopher and his Kind' and his fate is left unresolved.

The key love story of the drama is between Christopher and Heinz, a young working-class boy who Christopher pursues after Caspar returns to his 'hetter' ways. Unlike the other boys, Heinz is not selling his body and seem genuinely to be in love with Christopher, but their relationship is complicated by Heinz's brother's antipathy to Christopher and to the nature of their relationship. This leads to a showdown when Gerhardt joins the Nazi party and demands Christopher leave. As the Nazis gain power, the British characters leave one by one, until finally Christopher persuades Heinz to join him in England. The attempt to keep Heinz out of Germany fails thanks to the obtuseness of the Home Office, but Heinz ends up surviving the war and marrying a woman who, as he puts it 'doesn't ask questions'. A postwar encounter with Heinz shows Christopher to have become hardened by his experiences - no longer is he willing to help his former love escape, leading his old friend Auden to damningly tell him "The only cause you really care about, Christopher, is yourself", ameliorating the sting with "But you've turned it into an art form."

But the character of Isherwood is less selfish in those early days in Berlin. True, he is not particularly politically engaged - but then how many people really are, even in times of upheaval? Like many people, he wants to be able to pursue his own literary and romantic interests uninterrupted, but despite himself he cannot but become caught up in the events of the day. The rise of Nazism in Germany is somewhat simplified for the purposes of the film, with some characters engaging in clunky 'background' dialogue describing the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic. Urban working-class support for the Nazis (as personified by Gerhardt) is emphasised at the expense of the more politically powerful middle-class and clerical (both Protestant and Catholic) support the party enjoyed, giving the impression that the Nazis rose to power chiefly as a party representing the urban working classes when in fact it was often the opposite that was the case, particularly in Berlin.

Perhaps the nature of political change in the period is best summed up by Christopher’s philosophical landlady who said ‘The Kaiser, Herr von Baden, Herr Hitler… the names they change, life goes on’. This could well have been the viewpoint of many ordinary Germans who just wanted some kind of stability, and who, without necessarily supporting Hitler, just saw him as another name in a long list of leaders.

The production values were beautifully done, though an understandable reliance of interior shots didn’t give much of a feel for the city. But considering a set for 1930s Berlin would literally have to be built from scratch the interiors that were used seemed perfect for the period.

The necessity for Christopher to get out of Berlin due to the Nazi stance on homosexuality is made more urgent with Gerhardt’s threat ‘We don’t want your kind here’, the word 'kind' echoing the title. But the title perhaps refers less to homosexuality than to the type of people who inhabit the boarding-house – oddbods, eccentrics, people who could not find a home anywhere else but in the freewheeling, wild world of pre-war Berlin.

Aside from some clunky dialogue, over-acting and historical simplification, 'Christopher and His Kind' is a moving, affecting and intelligent drama. 

Beer In The Snooker Club

This is one of my favourite novels, and the edition pictured above boasts the only decent cover I’ve seen of this (admittedly infrequently published) work. I picked it up in a second hand bookshop in Limerick about five years ago, and with retrospect it probably should have cost more than €3, especially considering the rarity of the old Penguin edition. Perhaps its value will rise again with its reissue in December by Serpent’s Tail, complete with a new introduction by Diana Athill, in whose house the author lived and committed suicide in in 1969.

This novel triggered my interest in the now all-but-disappeared Egyptian Coptic elite. Leaders in society in the pre-Nasser area, the Copts, like the Greeks before them, were caught between worlds – the world of aristocratic Europe to which they aspired, with its country clubs and communication through French, and the dramatically unequal society in which they lived, where priests’ palaces adjoined slums and the fellaheen (peasants) laboured for a subsistence lifestyle while the elite held hunting parties on the land they tilled. It was inevitable that dramatic change would come, but the Copts had an extraordinarily ancient Christian heritage, almost unique in the area, that ran the risk of being lost forever after Nasser’s rise to power.

The author (a distant relative of former UN Secretary Boutros-Boutros Ghali) came from this rarefied world, and like his alter ego, the character Ram, entertained Marxist ideals before the disillusionment of experience and the ugly reality of post-revolution Egypt caused him to retreat into cynicism. The story covers the experiences of Ram and his avowedly Communist friend Font as they move from Cairo to London, full of romantic dreams of living an artist’s life in the East End, but are disillusioned by casual racism and their upper-middle class hosts’ lack of loyalty. When they return to Cairo, Nasser has taken power but the socialist revolution is far from the dream Font imagined, with a Jewish friend beaten half to death by soldiers and Ram’s excursions into amateur spying revealing endemic levels of prisoner torture.

But it’s more than just political disillusionment that stalks the characters. Ram particularly finds himself becoming more and more detached from any authentic sense of self as the novel progresses. A lifetime of floating between categories – West and East, European and Egyptian, socialist and playboy – as well as the tragedy of a failed love affair, leads him to separate his psyche in two, vividly described in the following passage from the novel:

‘That moment….was the very beginning – the first time in my life that I had felt myself cleave into two entities, the one participating and the other watching and judging.’

The cataclysm of that cleavage is what causes Ram to descend into cynicism and accept so many things that he had once found intolerable. I’ve never read any book that better encapsulates what it must feel like to be caught between two cultures, with no clear sense of belonging to either. Not only does it achieve this, it’s also funny, sympathetic and full of vividly drawn characters that encapsulate the two cities it memorialises. I hope its reissue brings it the widespread attention it deserves.

Too good to be true?

The Riace Bronzes

A recent episode of the Bettany Hughes series, The Ancient World, entitled ‘Athens: The Truth About Democracy’, covered the history and development of that unprecedented experiment in direct, representational democracy in 5th-century Athens. As expected, the show covered the astonishing achievements the Greeks made in art, drama and philosophy. Interestingly, Hughes pointed out that these achievements actually coincided with the period in which pure democracy was beginning to decline, eroded by the dominance of Pericles and the dragged-out nightmare of the Peloponnesian War.

Among the most notable achievements was the abrupt evolution of Greek sculpture from the stiff, Egyptian-like figures of the kouroi to the astonishing dynamism and realism of the Discobolus and the Riace Bronzes. The suddenness of this evolution and the perfection of the resulting art seems to be in keeping with the rest of the ‘Greek Achievement’, but an English sculptor has a different theory. Nigel Konstam, interviewed by Hughes in the programme, thinks that the lifelikeness of these sculptures is just that – namely that they were made using plaster casts of live models. He demonstrated how this could be done in his workshop, where a number of sculptors smeared plaster over a carefully positioned, suitably muscled male model.

Konstam didn’t stop there, though. His ultimate piece of evidence was the soles of some of the Riace sculpture’s feet. The underside of the sculpted toes and soles are flattened at exactly the same point a live standing model’s would be – a detail unnecessary for verisimilitude, since the soles are invisible. It’s a persuasive argument, though it could just as easily be argued that Greek sculptors paid the same attention to detail on the invisible as the visible in their work. A more convincing proof for the argument came to me as I looked at the images of various statues, something that has often occurred to me while looking at Greek sculpture – namely, that the heads and bodies often seem notably different to each other., Even when the proportions are perfect, as they usually are, the bodies are so life-like as to seem to be breathing, while the faces are oddly generic – both male and female faces have the same long noses, pursed lips and round cheeks (incidentally the young Elvis had a perfectly ‘Greek’ face). It’s less conclusive than the soles-of-the-feet evidence, but this disparity strongly indicates, from an aesthetic point of view at least, that models with perfect bodies were used as moulds for both male and female Greek sculptures, while the faces were created from imagination. It’s not implausible that such ripped torsos would be plentiful among Athenian citizens – soldiers in the triremes spent up to 8 hours a day solidly rowing.

If true, this theory rather takes away from the idea that the Greeks were innovators in sculpture, but the thought doesn’t bother me. Their myriad achievements in just about every other field more than make up for it.

Drawings of John Lennon by Klaus Voormann

Director's Cut - Kate knows what she's doing

Kate Bush’s new/old album Director’s Cut, a reworking of tracks from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes, has received largely positive reviews from critics and rather more mixed responses from the public. I’ve heard a few radio DJs expressing unhappy bemusement after playing the new versions of classic tracks such as 'Deeper Understanding', 'This Woman’s Work' and 'The Sensual World', a bemusement echoed and intensified by listeners’ texts. No doubt hearing new versions of old songs, especially ones that are already much-loved by fans, is going to provoke a reaction, and not always a good one. But I’m of the belief that the pissed-off fans are letting their emotions get in the way of their critical judgement.

I can accept that Director’s Cut, as a concept, could seem a bit pointless and redundant if you are a fan who already owns and appreciates the albums on which the tracks originally appear. But for people who are not familiar with her work it provides an almost perfect introduction to it, like a Greatest Hits, but with more care and effort put in. I am one of those people and I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to hear a cross-section of her older work and to hear how she is working now – how her voice sounds now as a mature woman, how her producing skills are as experimental and precise as ever, how her interest in music is not frozen in time and how (unlike many other world-famous artists) she is not resting on her laurels and releasing a best-of every couple of years to keep bread on the table. A lot of work has gone into producing this album, and that alone justifies the price.

Like most people, I was always familiar with Kate Bush; I knew her famous tunes and knew that she was the kind of artist I would like, but had not gotten around to investigating her properly. This was partly because of a fear of 80s production values – I couldn’t help but think that my enjoyment of her work would be hampered by an overload of cheesy synths and reverb. These fears have turned out to be unjustified, but it’s not hard to understand why I might have had them. Listening to the new tracks gave me a chance to sample a cross-section of her songs and decide from there if I thought her work was worth investigating further. The answer was, to echo the new version of the title track of The Sensual World, a resounding YES.

That song provides a good jumping-off point for approaching this album as a neophyte. I was only vaguely aware of the original song so on hearing the new version (now called 'Flower of the Mountain') I carried no baggage of expectation. All I knew was that she had succeeded in gaining permission from the notoriously protective Joyce estate to use Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the end of Ulysses as the lyrics. People who were used to the 1989 version, with Bush’s own adapted lyrics, can’t seem to get their heads around the song now, but as far as I’m concerned it works much, much better (as would befit its original conception). As Bush said herself: ‘I’m not James Joyce’, - while her adapted lyrics are quite poetic, they have nothing on the fluid, rushing, earthy lines of the original text. The soliloquy lends itself extraordinarily well to music, with lines like ‘when I put the flower in my hair like the Andalusian girl used or shall I wear the red yes’ flowing gorgeously through the tune and giving the song a subtler yet more powerful sensuality than the original’s somewhat-overdone breathiness. The drums and bass are stronger on this version too, giving the song a secure scaffolding and letting the uilleann pipes come through with more clarity. It’s not only the new lyrics that make this the definitive version of this song.

Other tracks serve as complements to the originals, rather than supplanters. 'Deeper Understanding', told from the point of view of a programmer drawn into an obsessive relationship with a computer has been extended and reworked to include a creepy Auto-Tune effect on Kate’s voice in the chorus (when the computer is supposed to be addressing the programmer). Some have argued that this cheapens the song somewhat, ‘spelling out’ the meaning for the listener rather than leaving it ambiguous. My main issue with this song is that on first hearing I thought the obsession described by the narrator was simply the rush of becoming absorbed in the complexity and mystery of programming itself, but on closer listening the lyrics seem to indicate that the narrator installs a programme that directly simulates a friend, a meaning that strikes me as overly literal. The new video, starring Robbie Coltrane and Noel Fielding, seems to bear this interpretation out. The song would be more compelling if the concept of the narrator befriending or falling in love with the computer was approached metaphorically, framed in a story about absorption in the programming process. This issue remains the same in either version, so I have no preference of the new over the old track or vice versa – they are both musically interesting in different ways, and the use of a Bulgarian women’s choir in both is very well done. The extended ending of the new version has a good deal of experimentation in various electronic sounds which will appeal to some and not to others – again it’s a matter of taste. 

'This Woman’s Work' is one of the few tracks that has been completely re-recorded, in a lower key to accommodate Bush’s mature voice. Again I wasn’t familiar enough with the original to be especially attached to it over the new. The original scores points for being sparer and not as reverb-heavy as the new, but Bush’s current, slightly lower voice is more to my taste. In both versions the power of the song remains undiluted. The same can be said for 'Moments of Pleasure', another entirely re-recorded track. 

A few critics have referred to The Red Shoes as one of Bush’s weaker albums, which only leads you to amaze at how good the good stuff must be, if tracks such as 'Lily', 'Moments of Pleasure', 'The Song of Solomon', 'Top of the City' and the title track are ‘bad’ by her standards! The songs from The Red Shoes that have been re-recorded remain fairly close to the originals so again fans can’t froth too much at changes. Having listened to both the new and original versions I think these tracks benefit hugely from the more muscular drumming and deeper vocals they receive on Director’s Cut – the vocals on 'The Song of Solomon' and 'Top of the City' particularly are much more powerful and affecting than in the originals, and the new drum track on 'The Red Shoes' – a track Bush has said in interviews that she is particularly happy with – gives the song the full, crazy propulsion necessary to carry its whirling-dervish beat and melody. 

Bush’s reasoning for recording this album was that she felt that the songs on the two original albums were not produced as well as she would have liked. The results on Director’s Cut bear her creative judgement out. There have been so many developments in audio technology since 1989 and the digitisation of the two original albums, at a time when digital audio technology was still developing, seems to have given the originals a rather thin sound. Bush’s decision to transfer the audio to analogue and re-record the drums and vocals was intelligent – it brought out the strength of the instrumentation that had got lost in the digital mist, and the new additions helped to, well, make the songs louder, which they needed to be.

'Rubberband Girl' is the only track which doesn’t seem to benefit much from re-recording – it has a strangely muted audio quality, which, if intentional, was misguided.  But apart from that Kate Bush hasn’t put a foot wrong in this album, and unlike many established artists, she’s not just plugging the gap between albums with repackaged old albums – she’s actually put in studio time and commitment, and given her fans something new and interesting. Breath is bated for her new album, and in the meantime there’s a whole back catalogue to discover.